Chapter Four, Forward Thinking, Composing Cyberspace

Forward Thinking about Chapter 4

    The Cory Garfin cartoon, "family@21st.century.hom," in the paper version of Composing Cyberspace (p. 148) pokes fun at our increasing dependence on electronic communication, even with the people closest to us. The ultramodern family portrayed here, despite being seated together "face to face" around their dining room table, communicates via networked computers. To accentuate the point, Garfin has replaced their heads with "emoticons" or "smileys," keyboard-text characters that visually express crude emotions, a convention that has developed from widespread use of e-mail. (You read emoticons sideways by tilting your head counterclockwise. The man seated on the right wears :-) or the common smiley face, usually used to mean "I'm happy" or "I'm joking"; the woman standing to the left appears to be winking above pursed lips.) The children's emoticons are not conventional or obvious ones -- is the child in the highchair frowning, the other child smiling and wearing a cap? -- and so the cartoonist seems to be exaggerating and satirizing the convention of using emoticons itself, just as he satirizes e-mail addresses in the caption.
    People developed emoticons because of the difficulty of expressing emotion and tone in written language, the primary means of computer-mediated communication or CMC. The advantages and disadvantages of CMC for expressing personal identity are explored in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3; this chapter examines both positive and negative effects of CMC and the Internet on building community. The questions of identity and community are closely linked, of course, since we most commonly form groups based on shared cultural identities, as well as physical proximity, and those groups, in turn, help us shape and express our identity. The most basic social group in our culture is the nuclear family, so in that context the notion of giving up some essential piece of our humanity is particularly disturbing -- in Garfin's cartoon, family members not only give up the expressiveness of their voices and faces but literally lose their heads! Moreover, even the food has become virtual ("one more byte"), and the safe physical haven of "Home Sweet Home" has been transformed by Garfin into an electronic "homepage" on the Web, accessible to millions of Internet users. Is this liberation, the cartoonist may be asking us, or a new form of enslavement?
    While emoticon heads are obviously absurd, some community members' dependence on electronic communication -- even among family members or people seated in the same room -- is not farfetched at all today. Corporate employees, even those in the same building or floor, work together on "intranets" or internal networks. College students who move away from home stay in touch with friends and family by e-mail, in most cases more frequently than they used to write paper letters (now referred to as "snail-mail"). Perhaps you already use CMC to get assignments from teachers, collaborate with classmates, or make plans with dormmates; you may even have experience electronically "chatting" with fellow students seated together in a computer classroom or lab (see Chapter 9 for a closer look at instructional technologies) or with other people across the Internet.
    It's on the Net, at a physical distance, where the potential of virtual community (that is, forming and maintaining bonds with people through CMC) is being most intensively explored and tested. In the following pages, Howard Rheingold tells several moving stories about people sharing interests and helping one another through conferences on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a pioneering online forum that may represent "one of the informal places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall." John Perry Barlow, another WELL veteran, relates similar experiences but also wonders about the missing ingredients of online communities -- the body and spirit, human diversity, and the sense of shared adversity that brings communities together.
    Amy Bruckman, a researcher from the Georgia Institute of Technology who has started two virtual communities, recommends that designers of such communities adopt specific policies about admissions, anonymity, and the architecture of electronic spaces. Among those spaces on the Internet, hundreds of newsgroups and Web sites are devoted to religion and spirituality, and in "Finding God on the Web," Joshua Cooper Ramo wonders whether this new medium has the potential to bring together people who have been lured away from their communities by TV. And finally, in what might be read as a cautionary tale or warning about virtual community written in the early 20th century, novelist E.M. Forster imagines a future in which everyone lives separately in cubicles, accesses information remotely, and communicates through the globally connected "Machine."
    In all these selections, you may observe the tension between pulling apart and pulling together that is at the heart of any discussion of community. Your own views about the impact of technology on community will be rooted in your experience with physical, face-to-face communities. Therefore you may find it useful first to think about that experience by listing some communities you've belonged to in your life, including communities with which you currently identify. Then choose one or more of those communities and consider the following:
    1. How did you participate in this community? What kinds of things did you do that constitute your participation or identification with this group? What interests or values did you share with other members of the community? Did everyone in the group share these interests or values? What interests or values did you not share with other members of the community?
    2. What conventions, etiquette, or rules governed your interactions with other members of this community?
    3. Think of a conflict or area of tension that was experienced in this community. What were your feelings about it? How did the community respond to this conflict or tension? To what extent was it resolved?
    4. How has computer technology affected this community positively, negatively, or neutrally? To what extent do you think the community bonds depend on physical presence or proximity?
    5. Social scientists say that most communication is nonverbal (including body language, gesture, intonation, etc.), but CMC is text based and eliminates most nonverbal cues. What do you think is lost and what do you think is gained when people communicate electronically? If you have access to a computer lab, classroom, or networked computers equipped with electronic discussion software, discuss this issue online using your real name.

Chapter 4 index || Research Links || More Online Readings & Resources |